Abstract:

The aim of internet of things is to integrate digital world and physical world seamlessly, search service for physical entities is one of key steps of the development of internet of things. Search service for physical entities enables users or applications to find those physical entities matching a set of requirements from huge amounts of dynamic physical entities. Physical entities, which are tightly bound to contextual information, not only contain static properties, but also real-time dynamic properties. Therefore, this paper proposes a metadata model to describe physical entity, its resource and entity service. Moreover, it considers characteristics used to estimate a search service for physical entities. Then, it refers to these characteristics to analyze and compare the representative search services for physical entities, and also discusses their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, it proposes open research issues and possible directions of future research related to the search service for physical entities.

Key words: internet of things, search service, physical entity, resource, entity service, metadata model